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New Azure Media Services Blogs

I’ve been very busy traveling to the International Broadcaster’s Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam and delivering two fantastic Microsoft Media Platform Summits in both Amsterdam and Prague. Now that I’m back in the office again, it’s time to get back to updating folks on what is new and upcoming in Windows Azure Media Services this Fall and into next year.

We have been in Preview release for about 4 months now across 6 data centers and things are going amazingly well. Lots of great feedback and interest from around the globe. As we approach our first official general availability release later this Fall, we will be updating the Services SDK for .NET and our MSDN documentation with new sample code and scenarios.

Nick Drouin, one of the Program Managers on the Windows Azure Media Services, has just started up a new blog (http://blog-ndrouin.azurewebsites.net/) to post sample code and how-to articles around using various features of Media Services. Some of you may know Nick already from his work on IIS Transform Manager. This year he is responsible for many of our cool new features in Media Services such as Dynamic Remux – the ability to encode and store only a single set of standard MP4 multi-bitrate files and allow Media Services to dynamically serve out either Smooth Streaming or Apple HLS to client players. This feature will reduce your storage costs and simplify multi-screen and multi-format delivery. We will expand this feature to include MPEG-DASH support, as well as dynamic encryption for DRM in the future.

Another feature that is coming soon is a set of updates to our Azure Portal experience to add even more support for Media Services directly in the Azure Portal. Keep an eye out for that later in the Fall.

As always, if you have any questions, please jump over to the Azure Forum for Media Services and post. I’m spending a lot more time over there answering questions lately. And if I miss a question due to my busy schedule, there are lots of knowledgeable folks on the team willing to help as well!